The Bigamist

by F. E. Mills Young

She looked at him with grateful eyes.

“I am so dreading this,” she said. “I don’t know how I should manage alone. I’m growing altogether to depend on you. It isn’t fair to you.”

But Dare would not allow this.

“It’s the one return you can make me,” he insisted,—“if there is any return called for. I am glad to be of any little service to you.”

To be of service to her was the only thing left him. This journey which he proposed making with her was the last opportunity, he supposed, that he would have of enjoying her society; the end of the journey meant the parting of the ways for them. He had no idea how the prospect of the future appealed to her, but for him it held little in the way of hope or interest. He would go on with his work, and get what satisfaction he could out of that,—it offered scope, and interest of one sort. Had she consented to marry him he would have retired and gone home; there was no necessity for him to follow his profession; but without her, work became a necessity of itself. Too much leisure would only conduce to thought.

He supposed that in time he would become reconciled to his disappointment; but for the present he could only realise the bitterness of the loss of a happiness which fate had seemed to place within his grasp, and had then wrested from him again with wanton caprice. He still held to it that Pamela was wrong in her decision; but while he could not persuade her into recognising her mistake, he was obliged to acquiesce in it. In his brain there lingered a faint hope that the journey to Pretoria would accomplish what he had failed to do,—that the meeting with Arnott would convince her of the impossibility of reuniting their severed lives. Since it was a matter of principle only with her, against which her nature revolted, he did not feel that there was any disloyalty in desiring her defeat. It would be best for her in the long run, and her good mattered to him equally with his own.

If occasionally a doubt crept into Pamela’s mind as to the ultimate result of her journey, she did not encourage it. There were certainly moments when she shrank from her self-imposed task, moments when she longed to give in, to take the happiness Dare offered and let the rest go. But reflection invariably induced a calmer mood, in which the impossibility of surrendering to love, with the past like a black shadow of disgrace between her and the happiness this man could give her, was painfully manifest. She had married Arnott, had clung to him when she knew she was not legally his wife; to refuse her obligation now were to degrade herself to the level of the women who subordinate honour to pleasure, who have neither a sense of responsibility nor any sort of pride. She had trailed her flag in the mud once; it was given to her now to raise it and cleanse it from the mire. She trusted that she would have the strength to go through with her undertaking to the finish.

The question that presented the greatest difficulty in leaving home was how to arrange about the children. To leave them to the sole care of coloured servants was impossible. Mrs Carruthers solved this difficulty as soon as she heard of Pamela’s intended journey. She carried them off to her own home, rather pleased to be enabled by some practical form of usefulness to salve a conscience which reproached her for her hasty and, as she believed, unjust suspicions of Arnott, whose illness, explaining the mystery of his silence, had closed the scandal attending on his disappearance.

Dare, in supplying her with details of the illness, had carefully omitted all mention of Blanche, and her part in Arnott’s life. It would come with all the shock of a fresh scandal if by their subsequent acts they revived the talk which had coupled their names already, and still reflected discreditably on the girl. He felt that the girl had yet to be reckoned with. She might prove a more formidable obstacle in Pamela’s path than the miserable wreck who had deserted her. Since her sole purpose was gain it would perhaps be possible to buy her off. But that eventuality would be a last consideration; purchased silence is expensive, and often dangerous. Dare had no intention of exposing Pamela to blackmail. Any money transaction that passed must be made through himself, and kept from the Arnotts’ knowledge. In the matter of Blanche Maitland he meant to exercise his own discretion. He desired if possible to keep her and Pamela from meeting. It formed one of his reasons for accompanying Pamela on her journey.

Mrs Carruthers, when she heard of this purpose of Dare’s, pronounced it the maddest of the many mad acts he had committed in connection with this affair. He was acting, in her opinion, with amazing indiscretion.